OK this is my list. But first, I need to say that this isn’t a condemnation of those into such thing. They just don’t vibe with me.
- Cannot get into ASMR. I’ve tried. Often its women 20 years younger than me, rubbing their fingernails on hairbrushes. The intentional sounds they make with their lips and fingers are things that would make me want to change seats on a bus.
- Instagram. I was maybe the last person to get a smart phone. It was probably 2016. I’m just fully lazy to take photos of stuff. This is a real issue when I’m single and I need to start putting photos on dating sites, as all pics of me in my phone are me squeezing carrots in my nostrils and similarly goofy things.
- My students’ taste in anime. I try to be all cool and show off my cool taste in anime, maybe drop a Azumanga Daioh clip. It’s all ancient history for 17 year olds.
- Photo and videos done in portrait mode. I guess I don’t watch videos on the go. See #2
Things that the kids these days do better:
- Usually better opinions on current events than people my age
- I wish that cosplay existed when I was a teen. The default when I was younger was drugs.
If anyone insults the kids, I will visit you at your home and do an
obsession with streamers. I literally cannot wrap my head around the appeal of watching another person that isn’t an actual friend play a videogame.
Community
Almost always there is a chat feature, and many successful streamers interact with that community live. For an old-folks reference, it’s not very different from MTV’s Total Request Live where part of the appeal was interacting with the hosts.
YES I ALWAYS EXPLAIN THIS PART WHEN TALKING TO BOOMERS ABOUT IT.
Like imagine you could be in a chat room cheering for the Eagles playing football with everybody else who was watching the game? That would be fun as hell and the trash talk/ insight is enjoyable
I think it’s really a reflection of the social conditions of our generation. Gen X chuds are a certain brand of paranoid and self absorbed, and generally made bad parents. Many western parents stopped letting their children participate in things outside the house because they were terrified their kid would get kidnapped. So instead, kids made friends with random people on the internet. So watching a stranger play Pokemon really doesn’t feel like much of a stretch for me.
The way kids have been semi-systematically confined to their homes makes me simmeringly furious.
Yup, my gen x dad wouldn’t even let me take a walk on our street just to get some exercise and fresh air, because he thought I would be kidnapped and SA’d. Kidnapping has never even happened in our town before.
Meanwhile, teachers, cops, and even the fire chief were caught messing with minors or having CSAM on their computer. But I was “safe” at school! And “safe” at home with my abusive step mother. Gen x chud dads are really something else.
Streamers are to Gen Z what sports teams were to boomers.
Just watching somebody you don’t know play a game and cheering for them because you happen to like them
That’s still different though. Like I get why people watch live streams of pro gamers competing, that’s the exact same as pro sports.
But watching somebody who isn’t good at the game or even funny/interesting for hours? That shit will always be alien to me. I watch pro sports and sometimes pro games like Counter Strike, but I don’t watch somebody who’s shit at football fumble the ball for 4 hours straight
Except not everybody watches only professional sports, and not everybody who watches sports does so for the love of seeing the sport played at a high level.
That’s why I compared it to sports teams, which people watch for the individuals, narratives, amongst other things
Funny enough there’s a few mid-tier streamers that I can watch. But their content is all edited decently, they cut out the bullshit opinions and bad jokes, and they’re pretty self-deprecating. It really helps to turn my brain off to just watch someone play a game I like and comment through it. If I couldn’t sleep, this would be my brain-off content. I’m thinking of Francis John or Call Me Kevin. I feel bad, but I’ve never contributed to anyone’s Patreon.
Remember celebrity culture back in the 90s and 00s? Figure it’s the same thing, mixed with the appeal of Mr. Roosevelt’s fireside chats.
I also like watching some of the S-tier streamers in games I play. Like watching very high level players in Naraka is incredible because they’re playing an entirely different game from the bush leagues where I hang out.
Imagine the millennial obsession of Bradgelina. Or Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman or Justin Timberlake. Or with hot tub streamers, imagine having a crush on your older sister’s female friends and trying to impress them. Or millennials who saw Evangelion and were like “omg so me” instead of having parents.
I literally cannot wrap my head around the appeal of watching another person that isn’t an actual friend play a videogame.
Imagine Wombo Combo or Leroy Jenkins but instead of millennials screaming and hollering together, it’s zoomers.
If you can understand these things, you can wrap your head around streamers.
The average streamer is straight up doodoo IMO, but some rare ones are good entertainers or speakers. I got into one for a while like 7 years ago that played mostly older games, but not all retro, and played a super wide variety (many of them entertainingly bad tbh), usually not for hours at a time unless the challenge was specifically to beat the game, and made like a game show out of selecting which one he would play, or what romhack, or whatever, and usually had other friends on to keep the banter up, play against him, whatever. And hilarious intermission gags.
After that fairly short phase though I really started to get into twitch after starting to become radicalized and watched some varying levels of left wing political streamers, like half of them trans, mostly for entertainment, and one for background noise during work. Most of them turned out to not have the best takes tbh, and I got sick of all but one by mid-pandemic and stopped. I’d say only one has really gotten at all parasocial feeling and that makes me a little uncomfortable tbh so I try to be mindful of it.
I also sometimes watch hasan clips but I straight up do not have time to watch his full streams ever lol, and its mostly him yelling at chatters for saying something reactionary I feel like so the edited clips are better and I can skip around if he gets stunlocked
Streamers are only useful as background noise for me. Whenever I try and just watch one, even smaller ones, I inevitably get annoyed - they have some personal quirk that bothers me, enforce the rules too little or too much, or when politics comes up, it’s usually either milquetoast lib stuff said sanctimoniously or people who are kinda left-leaning but their closeness to meaningfully good opinions is itself annoying as I want to push them on but I cannot because that would be creating a parasocial relationship. I prefer to just move on and remove them from algorithmic recommendations.
Having any kind of “allegiance” to a streamer or really any content (bleurgh) creator just seems unwise to me, no matter how amazing they are and correct they are on issues. Because the drama will come for them, and then instead of discussing real-world issues, you’ve delving into reddit threads about he-said she-saids to determine if they’re Still A Good Person or not.
It feels like the modern incarnation of celebrity culture but for people who say they don’t care about celebrities. “Oh no, I don’t give a shit about what’s going on with Taylor Swift or Megan Markle, caring about random people like that is kinda weird. HOLY SHIT have you seen the newest video by Blungle292? The video game challenge he just did is so INSANE and DIFFICULT.” And explicitly political streamers? Good god, I don’t even go near them, they’re inevitably uninteresting and annoying.
I will add one caveat to this actually but he doesn’t stream games and its not really a parasocial relationship because he is a Lakota elder in Chunka Luta Network. https://www.twitch.tv/lostsioux
Definitely check out this one because he is funny as fuck and has a lot of wisdom to share.
I used to think the same way. Until I meet Jerma.
Still, I watch his old streams only. Not fan of watching anything live.
Also, he has some bangers I like to rewatch before falling asleep.
Usually better opinions on current events than people my age
I’d even say that young people today have better opinions on current events than people my age had when they were their age. Most late Gen Xers were always awful about politics, just pure end of history garbage. We’re the generation that grew up with AES being replaced by Pizza Hut and shock therapy, and the kids these days grow up with the planet being set on fire by capitalism, so this shouldn’t surprise anybody.
2020 radicalized my mom and her politics now are “let the streets run red with the blood of the bankers” and she just sorta assumes I know what I’m talking about but we still frequently find new anti-communist brainworms just because the shit she was taught growing up is absolutely insane.
People talk about how Gen Aloha isn’t learning how to read and that’s a problem but fuck, Gen X got no history education whatsoever, they just threw a bunch of McCarthyism into the history shaped hole in the curriculum.
She listened to blowback season 4 and was blown away, she had absolutely no idea what happened in Korea
The kids seem mostly fine. They probably don’t understand quite how extraordinary the pressure is on them compared to even just 25 years ago. I’m very concerned about how their math skills are developing, but I think that has something to do with how much schools have fallen apart and/or turned into performance pressure cookers. They’re kinder than previous generations, and honestly it’s surprising to me that they are because of how fucked society is around them.
I don’t get their humor, but I assume it’s very funny if you’re in the know.
Video tutorials.
Just give me some damn written instructions I don’t retain anything from watching someone else do it 😣
Software tutorials especially. Even worse are the ones that are screen recorded off a 4K desktop so that unless you’re also watching the video at 4K, you’re not gonna be able to see where the mouse cursor is because the compression makes it almost invisible.
I wouldn’t blame it on the current generation, though. People my own age do this shit too.
I shouldn’t complain too much because it’s free tech support and they’re making these videos for no money , and probably for a program that I pirated.
I’m just baffled by the current generation being able to use video tutorials. I guess it’s what they’ve always had so they’re used to it but back in my day we used text and only the occasional picture!
Text instructions are so much easier to skim through. I don’t want to wait for someone’s stupid 12 minute long “ULTIMATE guide for pee pee poo poo” to load and jump randomly through the video to find the relevant two second long section that contains the information I’m looking for that I could have easily found in five seconds if they had just made a text guide for it and I could have ctrl-f’d to find the exact information I needed.
Also I hate how every loser calls their guide the “ULTIMATE guide to X.” Terrible fucking buzz word. If I see anything that calls itself the ULTIMATE guide for whatever I’m skipping it by default, fuck you.
the only good video tutorials are something like “serive and maintenance for sram s7 spectro.mov” and it’s a guy with a native dialect you’ve never heard in your life
Me watching the same tut five times because the premier expert in the world is from Delhi and I struggle with that accent. Or, like, someone who clearly learned English as a second language and is all “I apologize for my poor english” in the description like they’re not a goddamn superhero for being the only documentation on the entire internet for some obscure thing.
instructables.com lmao
I used to be all over that shit. Video tutorials are slightly easier to make (poorly) and like one time out of ten you get details from the video that are hard to get from photo/text directions, but mostly they’re just bad
I can’t blame this on Zoomers. I think this is entirely an SEO thing. As google got worse and worse we went from websites to blogs, and now blogs are almost entirely gone. Once SEO really lit off and the 5 social media companies took over everything youtube was the closest thing to an accessible permanent store of information most people had. I think the rise of video tutes and video essays follows directly from that, a bunch of shit circumstances converging on a shit singularity.
You know, transcribing video tutorials and formatting them might be a legitimate use for LLMs.
For me it depends a lot on what it’s a tutorial for. Like, I hate music lesson tutorials, always feels like it’s moving on before I absorb what I need. Home repair tutorials, on the other hand, those are boss because often the written instructions are vague or not optimal, and seeing exactly what physical movement the instructions meant is helpful.
I’m early Gen Z and the thing I kinda dislike is how shameless this generation is.
Anime is a good example. It used to be a niche thing for nerds that you were kinda ashamed of outside of Studio Ghibli, but now it’s really mainstream. That’s all well and good but then you have some people with hentai stickers on their school laptop. Instead of adopting anime as a medium, we adopted the worst forms of otakuism. Instead of mass adoption tempering the worst aspects, it appears to have emboldened them instead.
I also know some people who go around sfw anime cons and pay women to step on them in public. When I said this was kinda weird, I was the one in the friend group that got flack. Gen Z is more willing to embrace their weird habits but some stuff should be done at home or with private groups.
This is definitely something that should be taken seriously. I went to a tattoo shop a few years ago with my wife and her brother. The artist doing my tattoo had a few pictures of his work posted and I didn’t think anything of it, but when I finished up and was waiting for my brother in law to finish up I noticed that his artist had just straight hentai posted on the walls of his area. And no they did not look of age.
I’ve noticed this too, I got a younger Gen Z coworker and the dude straight sits in the break-room blasting the nastiest anime at full volume on his phone, no earphones, the worst dub you’ve heard in your life, and me trying to drink my club soda in peace while browsing twitter and hexbear and listening to the squeakiest anime girls moaning, sighing, oooing and aaahing…like my nephew in Christ, outer-ear headphones are a thing BUY THEM plz
I can’t say if it was a Zoomer or not because I just saw the car itself not the driver, but the worst example of that I saw was a car I walked by with a ton of anime stickers on the back. A few were innocuous but most of them were lewd but not outright nude/pornographic. However, they were all explicitly related to a particular kink/fetish:
sex stuff
Hucows
And not just in the imagery, lots of euphemistic word play/puns on the kink. The kicker though was in the middle of all that, was one bumper sticker that just said “sorry mom.”
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